The Twyborn Affair (18 page)

‘I can't arrive home,' she panted, ‘without being able to boast that I danced with the famous Eddie Twyborn.' ‘Infamous' might have been the implication, as her nervous, though steely hand dragged him back into the maelstrom of a foxtrot, in which her abandoned ginger baby had continued whirling as solo jetsam.

‘Won't you admit there's fun in life?' she hissed at him as they pumphandled through their steps.

‘Oh, it's fun all right!' Too hilariously awful funny.

‘We all know you've been through hell. But now it's over.'

When it was beginning again, if indeed it had ever stopped.

Margs was determined to prove a point. She had thrust a cam
paigning vulva as deep as possible into his crotch; her rather flat little breasts were bumping and grinding against his chest; the heat of her wiry body smelled agreeably natural emerging from its mist of talc. He would have liked to feel more than kindly disposed, to have given her the opportunity to think she was making her contribution to post-war therapeutics.

She was grinning up. ‘Darling, you may be brave, but a girl's feet aren't the enemy. What about finding something else we could do together?'

He was saved by the ginger baby.

Brandishing its rattle at the end of a hairy arm, it screamed, ‘You're hogging the lieutenant, Mummy! Poor Baby, must have a turn.'

The colonel's crotch was almost as possessive as Margie Gilchrist's, and certainly more developed than her breasts.

‘Eddie,' the sultana called across the deck, ‘save me the waltz. A waltz is what I'm dying for.' To illustrate, she swooned so elaborately that she brought her swaggie partner down.

At that moment the music stopped and Eddie Twyborn escaped from the muscular embrace of ginger arms.

While they were all laughing, stamping, shouting, clapping, he scuttled down the companionway into the smelly-clean bowels of a ship and the asylum of his cabin. When he had bolted his door, taken off his clothes, and shot La Rochefoucauld into a corner, he lay down—expecting what?

All night, it seemed, giggles and explosions, a traffic of clumsy, spongy feet filled the corridor. At intervals a handle was rattled, at others almost wrenched off.

Margie Gilchrist's exploratory vulva, or alternately the colonel's opulent crotch, was forced against his sleep.

Fremantle, 4 mars 1920

Said there would never be another diary, and here it is (like masturbation) in that old
cahier
I found amongst Angelos's belongings—the stationer's imprint A. Diamantis, 26 rue du Commerce,
Smyrne (the French touch hovering over every Greek of a certain age and any pretensions).

But Fremantle, the first glimpse, the first whiff of a fate which can never be renounced, is enough to drive the pretensions out of any expatriate Australian.

A party organised for sight-seeing in Perth this morning. It ended up as Angie Parsons, Margs Gilchrist, Colonel ‘the Baby' Wilbraham-Edwards, and a widow hurtling back into circulation, Mrs Merv ‘call me Dawn' Pilbeam. I gave belly-wobbles as my excuse for not joining; might be a drag on their sport. The party accepted my reasons, while not wholly convinced. They tottered down the gangway on the first stage of their fun-finding, the ladies precarious on their heels, the colonel waving back. All soon quenched. No heat, or is it the glare? more quenching than that of Fremantle.

After letting the party make its getaway, I went down into the town. Rusted railway-lines are strips of red, solidified heat. Wharfies sweating round their hairy navels. I am the stranger of all time, for all such hairy bellies an object of contempt—a Pom, or worse, a suspected wonk. If only one had the courage to stick a finger in the outraged navel and await reactions. Nothing minces so daintily as an awakened male.

Dream streets: the tiny houses in maroon or shit-colour brick. Paint-blisters on brown woodwork. Festoons of iron doilies which suggest melting caramel. Blank, suetty faces of women framed in grubby lace or muslin curtains, as they peer out in search of something to whet their interest. A little pomeranian dog, white coat with patches of pink eczema. An ageing blonde stands holding the dog to her bosom, fat dissolving on her vast arms. A gold armlet eating into a fatty biceps, the neatly folded, obsessively laundered hankie held in place by this dented gold circlet.

Oh, God, but I feel for them,
because I know exactly—
they are what I am, and I am they—interchangeable.

Perhaps I should have gone with the Hoorah Party, fun-finding in Perth. Fremantle is something to be passed over because so pain
fully personal. No doubt that's why I chose it—the expatriate masochist and crypto-queen.

Drank a schooner in a tiled bar. The acid smell, not quite urine, of draught beer. The ‘head' forming as a red hand pulls on the joystick. The barmaid's rattling cough accompanied by a blast of morning gin.

One old professional blue-nosed soak, a finger crooked above the slops in his glass, tries to engage the interloper.

• O.S.:
  Owdyer findut, eh? in Fremantle.
  
• ME:
  All right, I suppose. Yes, all right. [Hopeful laughter]
  
• O.S.:
  Not all the Poms do. An' I can't see why. [His turtle's neck at work as he swallows the last of the slops.]
  
• ME:
  I'm not a Pom.
  
• O.S.:
  Go on! You're not? [He stands looking in need of a reassurance he does not expect to get.] What are yer, then?
  
• ME:
  [because it's useless to explain.] I'm a kind of mistake trying to correct itself.
  

Too much for Fremantle. The silence hits me in the small of the back, like the sheet of frosted glass with
BAR
engraved on a lyre of ferns.

I am in the street. I am the Resurrection and the Dead, or more simply, the eternal deserter in search of asylum. I did not leave Angelos, but might have done so. I did not desert from the army because it would have been too difficult. In such situations you're sucked in deeper, while remaining a deserter at heart.

At a draper's I buy for five shillings a cardigan in grey string. Stagger out again into the glare not knowing why I've made my purchase, except that it might encourage a humility I've never been able to achieve. And there, oh God, is the Greek shop I've been expecting while dreading.

 

SNACKS DINNERS SODAS SUNDAES
ALL HOURS
PROP: CON ASPERGIS

 

Will Con the Prop recognise the con?

At the Greek's there is a soft, sticky gloom, the Greek concession to Fremantle's version of Australian brown: an atmosphere made up of frying fat (oil, dripping, or a mixture of both) synthetic ‘flavours' mingled with freezing gusts, light filtered through stained glass on to bas reliefs of dusty, brown-gold nymphs. The usual assortment of clotted sauce bottles, cruets and fly-specked ‘mee-news'.

I sit and wait at a stained table. For a moment I am tempted to smear my throat and wrists with tomato sauce, snuffle it up through my nostrils, and fall across the table, some kind of Greek sacrifice crossed with an Australian fate—lie there for poor Con to find and misinterpret.

He comes out through the bead curtain, a thickset, short-arsed man, thin on top, but with wisps of damp black hair sprouting from various parts of his body. Thick arms hanging alongside the stained apron. The inevitable wedding ring conspicuously gold on a finger swollen by kitchen rites. For the customer, Con is wearing a golden smile, while Greek eyes wonder whether the Turk has arrived.

• E.:
  What'uv we got for dinner, Con? [The Greek can't know about this hearty self evolved solely for his benefit.]
  
• CON.:
  Good fress fiss. Tsips. Stike 'n' onions. Stike 'n' eggs. All very spessul.
  
• E.:
  Then echeis kephtehthes?
  
• CON.:
  No
  kephtehthes
  . [Tongue held against the palate produces that clicking noise which is the sound of Greek negation.] You spick Grick, eh? [The Greek eyes again suspicious.]
  
• E.:
  How I speak Greek!
  
• CON.:
  You not Grick. Where you learn?
  
• E.:
  In another life. In Byzantium.
  [The Greek roars for this mad joke before steering into safer waters.]
  
• CON.:
  What you teck for dinner?
  
• E.:
  Knowing the Greek, whatever he decides I must teck.
  
• CON.:
  [relieved by this lesser madness.] You teck fiss. Fiss is good. [He calls the order through the bead curtain.]
  

Two boys have come out, one of a superior teen age, and a small inquisitive roly-poly. If the youth is inquisitive too, he has learnt to disguise it. The father, muttering in the background, tells them he has on his hands some kind of foreign, Greek-speaking madman.

• CON.:
  [returning to the foreground.] You titch my boys Grick, sir. Ross and Phil don't wanter learn their own language. [The older boy prowls in an agony of disgust against the far wall of the café. He would like to dissociate himself from this communicative father.]
  
• CON.:
  Ross make big progress at 'ighschool. 'E'll study Law.
  
• E.:
  Poor bugger!
  
• CON.:
  Eh?
  
• E.:
  Good on 'im!
  [Ross can't take any more. He stalks between the tables and out the shop door, a disdainful Greek imitation of the emu. The father is occupied professionally, but the roly-poly P
  HIL
  is fascinated by what is new.]
  
• P.:
  [very softly, as he examines a heap of spilt salt on the surface of the table.] Where you from?
  
• E.:
  From here.
  [The roly-poly's lip, his downcast eyes, are disbelieving.]
  
• P.:
  You been away for long?
  
• E.:
  Yes, ages—at the War.
  
• P.:
  [acquisitively] Got any souvenirs on yer?
  
• E.:
  Don't go in for souvenirs. There's reminders enough, if you want them, in your mind.
  
• P.:
  No helmuts? Byernets? Didn't you ever kill someone?
  
• E.:
  I expect I did.
  
• P.:
  Got any medals?
  
• E.:
  I lost it.
  [The questions are becoming intolerable, and only beginning. The customer gets up and is preparing to leave.]
  
• P.:
  Hey, yer order, mister!
  [For C
  ON
  is at this moment returning with it, mummified in yellow batter, beside the mound of glistening chips.]
  
• CON.:
  You no want yer good fiss dinner? [The incredulous wedding ring on the Greek's stumpy, tufted finger; all the best men are ringed.]
  
• E.:
  Oh, I want all right—yes! But somehow always miss the bus …
  [Puts down some money and escapes into the outer glare, which blinds at least temporarily.]
  

 

‘But who will I say?'

‘You needn't say anybody, need you? If she's in the garden I'll just go out.'

It was too much for the young parlourmaid. She had reddened all the way up her neck. The points of her cap were quivering for what she had been taught was an offence against accepted behaviour.

‘Mrs Twyborn won't like that.' The girl had begun to prickle with tears of anger.

‘She was never all that orthodox herself.'

The situation was something the maid's starch was unable to protect her against, so she turned and blundered out in the direction of the servants' quarters.

He was left with this house in which the owners had gone on living without his assistance. He wondered what part he had played in their lives during his absence, perhaps no more than they in his own unwilling memory: a series of painful, washed-out flickers. Unless those who lead what are considered
real
lives see the past as an achieved composite of fragments, like a jig-saw from which only some of the details are missing, or cannot be fitted.

Since encouraging his parents' maid to surrender her responsibility here he was, surrounded by all the details of the classic jig-saw waiting for him to put them together, more alarmingly, to fit himself, the missing piece, into a semblance of real life. He could hear a tap dripping (there had always been a tap dripping in the cloakroom). Hanging from a peg there was the rag hat the Judge used to wear
when he went fishing with his mates Judge Kirwan and Mr Mulcahy
K.C.
Opulence still showed through the texture of scuffed rugs; and on the Romanian mat, the place where Ruffles had pissed was only slightly darkened by time. He hesitated, dazed by the perspective of other rooms, opening through light and memory into a blur of acacia fronds and hibiscus trumpets.

He progressed slowly to the far side of what was referred to as the ‘drawing room', with its crumpled chintz, sunken springs (‘natural comfort', Eadie called it) Town Cries, figurines, paperweights, the inherited Dutch chest shedding its marquetry scales, the unnatural photographs of relations, friends, associates, assembled over an indiscriminate lifetime (himself in a white tunic, lace-up boots, simpering from beneath a fringe while holding a sword). Now defenceless (supposedly an adult) standing on the ridge between the French doors, from which he must descend by way of the discoloured marble steps, the corroded, unstable handrail, into Eadie's ‘beloved' garden (as her women friends, the Joanie Golsons, referred to it) this morning a chaos of suffocating scents and emotions. He had to face it. Now or never. Must. And did.